Numlock Sunday: Max Nisen on vaccines and treatments

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to my friend Max Nisen of Bloomberg Opinion who covers the business of medicine and drugs. We spoke last year in a Sunday edition all about why drugs are so expensive in the United States.

Given his recent coverage of the coronavirus vaccine and treatment effort, I thought it’d be timely to have him back. He’s been really ahead of the curve on this stuff, writing “Deadly Viruses Aren't Pharma's Top Priority. Why Not?” as early as January, which I wrote up in Numlock here:

The recent outbreak in China has many wondering about the ability of the U.S. pharmaceutical business to respond to a threat, and, well, don’t think about that. The majority of the pharmaceutical R&D is from just 20 pharmaceutical companies that spent more than $2 billion in 12 months,…